Yes, my company, about a decade ago had a mythical "10x" programmer. He was very very brilliant and could come up with incredible fixes to complicated problems. He was just a super bright and intelligent person and could often grok the full nature of the problem before I even was mid-way thru explaining it to him.

His big fault was that he was temperamental and suffered from "shiny ball syndrome". That is, because he was so smart he would get bored with all the mundane task required of him (which is in reality 80% of normal work week), thus he would either not do them or invent reasons why they weren't necessary.

We eventually had to let him go and we fretted a long time about how to replace him. Eventually we agreed we would never find anyone nearly as smart as he was, so settled on a "mere mortal" developer.

In contrast, the person we found may require more back and forth meetings to understand the problem and often requires a few weeks to fix things that his predecessor could fix in a day....

BUT, he is very consistent and operates like clockwork. Week in and week out in the last decade we made consistent improvements to the product. He always manages to complete his task - even the mundane items - albeit it takes more time.

In the end work ethic and persistence trumps raw brilliance.